Tag: messenger app

The Canadian tech company announced that its BBM has been beefed up as a focus is placed on software.

The tech company from Windsor, Canada may be struggling when it comes to hardware, but it is using its popular BlackBerry Messenger program and other software to help to bring itself back into relevance and profitability.

The company has announced that it has beefed up its free BBM application for all smartphone operating systems.

There are several new features that have been added to the BlackBerry Messenger app, many of which will be quite appealing to the current and future users of the mobile application. Among the most appealing could be one that allows a user to “retract” a message that was sent to a recipient in error. This option also allows a user to set a time limit on the existence of a message that has been sent.

For instance, the new BBM features make it possible for users to be able to decide whether or not they would like to publicly reveal their physical location. They can decide that they do or do not want to share this data and, if they do, they can state exactly how long they wish to continue to do so.

Until very recently, most of those features did actually exist in the BBM mobile app, but they were available only when using the premium version of the application, for which people paid an annual $12 subscription fee. That said, now that social messaging competition is headed skyward, BlackBerry has opened up these features to users of the free mobile app.

According to the BlackBerry senior vice president of BBM, Matthew Talbot, “Building on the renowned immediacy, reliability and security inherent to BBM, the new release provides unmatched level of privacy and control to BBM users without any subscription fees.”

Talbot also went on to say that providing control over the BlackBerry Messenger content and messages shared by users can ensure that those individuals can be confident in the control they have over that information.

At the same time, the messaging service doesn’t appear to intend to replace the fees with ads.

WhatsApp, the popular Facebook owned mobile app messaging service has now announced that it won’t be charging an annual subscription fee to allow users to use the application and its features.

Instead, it will be testing various tools that would allow mobile applications user various communications.

Among them will be to let the mobile app users to take advantage of direct communication with organizations such as businesses through the use of the application. WhatsApp currently has an estimated 900 million users around the globe. It functions across many models of smartphone and several mobile operating systems. While many people might assume that the service would be changed to include third party advertising in order to replace the revenue that will be lost from dropping the subscription rate, this is apparently not going to be the case.

The fee is now going to be waived for the use of the mobile app and no third party ads will be replacing it.

At the moment, the fee being charged for an annual subscription of WhatsApp has been $0.99 USD or the equivalent for other countries worldwide. That fee is typically waived for the first year, already, and then begins once the second year gets started. That said, this fee is going to be removed completely over the next few weeks.

According to the official WhatsApp blog, it will be opening up a number of tools that allow for direct communication with businesses. It explained this by saying that “That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight.”

This mobile app was among the first ones that make it possible for people to skip over their network charges for texting, while still being able to send and receive text messages over smartphones. This has made the program increasingly popular among younger generations of device users. This service is currently facing rising competition from rivals such as those offered by Google. This may very well be a strategy to boost the competitive edge of the company.